Around the mobile world – Fall edition

Sony VAIO X, Nokia N900, HTC Hero, and more

It’s been a while since I wrote my last blog. I am still pretty much happy with my current mobile arrangement and haven’t planned to make any major plan on my devices. Here is the summary where I am right now:

I am still carrying my beloved Sony TZ290 (dual hard drive – SSD SLC 64GB + 5400 RPM 250GB HD). It is still my main laptops that I even love it more after installing the full version of Windows 7 on it. Next to it, occasionally, I switch to my Mac Air. It is the first generation but the hard drive has been upgraded to 5400 rpm 120GB. The Mac Air gives me a good portability alternatives. For light usage and non-work related task, Mac OS shines really well; especially with the Snow Leopard upgrade. Now as for day-to-day mobility, I combine the superior messaging of Blackberry Gemini (which take care all my messaging needs from email, quick tweet and facebook update) and the fun and lots of usefull apps of iPod Touch (which take care the rest of my need: entertainment, games, web browsing). Of course, the backbone of the connectivity of all these devices are the Sprint MIFI, which supply the Internet connection to all my devices above.

Of course, despite of my contentment with all my devices, I always in tune on what is out there. Honestly, there aren’t much things going on in the last couple months that makes me excited. A couple rumors that I had wished it was true but unfortunately I have to wait. Finally there are some excitements around mobile world this months. Here are several announcement around the world:

1. Sony VAIO X
After being dormant in the department of innovation for a while (the last product release, Sony VAIO P is not that successful), they came out today with a whole new super-thin Sony VAIO X. The demo unit is very dissapointing as it is using Atom processor (Mac Air is using a full Core 2 Duo system). However, they said that there are possibility that they change the specification. I cross my finger that it is true.

2. Nokia N900
Last June, Nokia released the one supposed to be their main flag pda phone, Nokia N97. It is pretty much a flop in general, despite some loyal customers still love them. The main reason is the under the hood Symbian OS need a real upgrade to support a decent multi-touch experience and the price is way too high! It is also quite buggy (before the software updates). Just last week, Nokia announced another line of product for the N series. It is called N900. To me this is an interesting announcement. For one, it is going to kill N97 market for sure and secondly, this device does not use Symbian (this is actually a Maemo phone!). I never been a fan of Maemo. I own two of the Nokia Internet Tablet and I found there is really lack of serious software development out there for the platform. Where is my Facebook app on Maemo? How about twitter client? At least with Symbian, the collection of the softwares are quite complete. I hope with this Nokia 900, the Maemo community will push more day-to-day software beyond the “geek” community. Please cater the “casual” users too.

3. HTC Hero is coming to Sprint
This is exciting news. Too bad they don’t keep the same look and feel of the GSM version of HTC Hero but this phone is really cool. It is not a Google phone (Google branded phone), so even it has Android as the main OS, HTC is free to put its own sofware on the top of the phone. One of the big thing to me is the support of Microsoft Exchange of course, which is silly that Google decided to not allowing that Active Sync installed on the real Google Phone. The user experience on combining all the messaging and contact in one place is very cool too. Now within my contact address, I can see all my message thread that I made with my friend (including their Facebook update too!) That is so cool.

4. More choices of smaller tablet devices
From rumor of bigger iPod touch to a real announcement of Toshiba JournE and several of updates on eBook department (from Sony and others) with devices that support touch, this “mini tablet” department starts to grow and I am excited to see this. I remember when I first own Motion Computing LS800, I said to myself, this is a perfect companion device, I just wished that it was a bit smaller, much lighter and really focus on applications that are “relevant” to that form factor. I personally really hope that Apple will deliver the 7 inches iPod Touch. I will swap my current iPod touch with that in the heart beat!

Alright, those are my main three news that I will closely watch in the next couple weeks. Any updates, I will continue post it to my blog. Let me know what you think is cool to you!